Some states are racing ahead of others with their coronavirus vaccine rollouts. Their secret? Keeping it simple.

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Wed, 2021-02-03 20:30 — mike kraft

Some states are racing ahead of others with their coronavirus vaccine rollouts. Their secret? Keeping it simple. Fifty different vaccination strategies have yielded unexpected leaders and lessons about what works. Griff Witte Washington Post

They all started in the same place, with no one immunized, no stockpiles of vaccine and no choice but to dive in immediately with perhaps the most high-stakes public health campaign in American history.

Seven weeks later, the nation’s states are all racing to deliver a potentially lifesaving defense against the novel coronavirus to millions of arms. But some states are having far more success than others.

In the states moving fastest, up to 1 in 7 people had received at least their first injection as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. At the other end of the rankings, it was 1 in 17.

Health experts had expected the wide disparities, given that states had broad latitude to devise their own strategies, with conspicuously little federal coordination. Far less predictable were the particular states that would be leading the way and those lagging behind. On either end, it has been a mix of large and small, urban and rural, red and blue.

Yet, if there’s one thing that the states moving fastest have in common it is that they have tried to bring at least some measure of order and simplicity to a process otherwise marked by chaos and complexity.

In South Dakota, distribution of the vaccine has been limited to a small number of health-care providers who meet via phone twice a week and can make decisions on the fly as conditions change.

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Connecticut has teamed with a well-established partnership network while using community ambassadors to advocate for the vaccine among populations where hesitancy runs high.

And West Virginia has tightly coordinated its rollout, using the National Guard to speed supplies to where they are needed while streamlining the rules for who can get the shots.

Officials in the three states say that though coronavirus vaccination is inevitably complicated, they want to keep it from being any more confusing than necessary. ...

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